Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev and the US Surgeon General discuss loneliness as a mental health crisis at the Harvard Event

“We are into a lot of transformational technology, but real work to transform human beings has not started yet. It's extremely important that we invest in human transformation,” said Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev on combating loneliness. He was speaking, on Saturday, to the United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, at an event organised by the Sadhguru Center for a Conscious Planet, hosted by Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Terming loneliness “an incubation period for mental illness,” Sadhguru said the sense of isolation happens at the “individual level within the family structure” making it difficult for doctors, institutions or the government to enter this “private space (which has) become destabilised and uncontrolled.” Sadhguru urged people to commit to creating their own well-being rather than waiting for well-being.”

“Mind is a miracle, but most humans are using it as a misery manufacturing machine,” he said. One of the reasons for loneliness is because “the value of solitude is gone” in a digitally enabled and highly distracted world in which the ability and opportunity to express oneself has overshadowed the value of enhancing one’s ability to deepen the experience of life. Access to ‘heaps of information’ has given people a false ‘sense of knowing everything’ without the experience.

The Conscious Planet Movement- which Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev launched to raise human consciousness, will soon release a Miracle of Mind App to give individual human beings fingertip access to Yogic tools and technologies with which they can create their inner wellbeing.

“There is no substitute for individual people taking their physical and mental health as their personal responsibility,” Sadhguru said, adding that it was “not for a government, a doctor (or) anybody to fix for me to ensure that I am physically, mentally healthy. Because (then) the privilege of being human will be lost.”

Murthy said though technology has “brought extraordinary benefits to our lives”, it has made people more digitally connected but emotionally “disconnected from themselves as well as each other.” He shared concerning statistics about the impact of loneliness on human health: it increases the risk of heart disease by 29%, the risk of stroke by 31% and the risk of dementia among older people by 50% in addition to increased risk of premature death. Murthy hoped that humanity would consider this challenge an opportunity “to rethink how we live our lives, how we define success (and) what's important to us.”